FEATURES

Frederic Almond: Scarred for Life

By Renelle RobertsThe 700 Club

Original Air Date: January 10, 2011

CBN.com
 “It was like a movie. When you go from one extreme to the next, it is horrifying," Frederic Almond tells The 700 Club. "When you feel helpless and no one’s coming to your rescue when you’re calling out for help. All I could do was pray.

“When I was 11, a burglar broke into our house, stabbed and killed my mother, and he stabbed me 39 times.”

One day earlier…

“The thing that stuck out was when the pastor said, ‘You have to accept Christ as your Savior.’ I thought about it, and I wanted Christ in my life. I knew it was a good thing, and so I went up to the altar. I just knew in my heart I did something that was good!

“It was Labor Day weekend. We’d just had our little celebration. We were coming home, and it was getting late. I can remember getting my new outfit ready for the next day… trying to look really good for the girls. I was just excited all over.

“There was a man in her room with a knife and he was stabbing my mom. He just kept stabbing… like a butcher going after meat, chopping it up.

“I cried out, ‘Jesus!’ He turned around and started chasing me. My mother jumped on him. I ran to my closet . I said, ‘Lord, Lord, I want to live, I don’t want to die!’ I tip-toed down the hallway, got the phone and started dialing.

“He noticed me trying to get help so he throws her down and comes after me. He starts to stab me until he thought I was dead. I thought he stabbed me one time. I didn’t feel or know that I had been stabbed so many times.

“I watched him take my mom’s life away. Between both of us, we had been stabbed over 80 times.

“He walks past me and takes the valuables. He kneeled down, took out his knife and cut me on my face to see if I would flinch or anything. That’s how I knew who he was. After being stabbed 39 times in the neck, throat, back, arm, and other areas, God gave me strength to get up. When the police came, they called the ambulance.”

The attacker was arrested and is serving 25 years to life.

Frederic says, “The attacker changed my life. He took my mother’s life. I’ve got all these scars. I can barely talk and I have to fight for my life every day. I hated him. I would just daydream about different things that I could do to him – torture, so that he could feel what I went through.

“My mom was my everything. Her smile could light up the room. It was her, me and my brother and he had just joined the military. But we were very close. She was my inspiration. I couldn’t go to the funeral, because I was in the hospital and they said it would be too much.

“After all this happened, I was upset with God. Now I was living with my aunt. At times, I’d go home and look in the mirror cursing myself, ‘I hate you! I wish you were dead!’ I wouldn’t cry or show emotion in front of other kids, but when I went home I was a wreck.

“My aunt was already working on me going to stay with my brother for a little while. He said, ‘I’m going to church.’ Okay, no problem. He’s the adult; I’m the kid so I just did what he said.

“As soon as I went inside, I felt comfort. I felt peace. I felt so much love that it was incredible. I cried and cried. It felt literally like God was in a physical form hugging me, and I just wept. I accepted Christ whole-heartedly. I was grateful for the change that was occurring in my life.

“So when He said ‘forgive,’ I just did it! So, for years I thought that I had pretty much let this thing go. But Scripture tells us to pray for our enemies. I said, ‘Pray for your enemies? What? For real?’ All this time I’m like, ‘Okay, cool, no problem, I can do it.’ But once it came to my heart to actually pray, I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t want to do it.

"I said, ‘Wow, I need to learn from this thing called forgiveness.’ I had to pray for him, ‘God, bless him. Touch his life. Change his life.’ It is important to forgive, because it has power over you if you don’t forgive. Once you let it go, God voids that gap. A lot of times we think that if I let it go I’m going to look like he got the best of me, but that’s not the case. You have to be courageous to do it, no doubt. Once I did it, I felt free!”